LIMERICK — An environmental group’s attempt to argue that Exelon Nuclear must consider “alternatives” to preventing severe disasters at its Limerick Generating Station before the plant’s license is renewed for another 20 years was rejected Wednesday by a federal panel.

The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board cited not the merits of the argument made by the Natural Resources Defense Council but rather the conflict between the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s regulations and the National Environmental Policy Act, enacted in 1970.

(Click here to read the entire decision and a reporter’s notes on the document.)

The decision’s authors wrote that the NRC’s request that the matter be decided “leaves us in a difficult and ambiguous situation.”

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In fact, the authors wrote, the way the regulations are set up, the environmental group’s effort to have a new study of new threats and new science as part of the re-licensing review for Limerick is functionally impossible.

“Our review of the regulations leads us to conclude that this is an impossibility,” the three-judge panel wrote of NRDC’s request for more study of potential new safety threats, particularly those resulting from the issues related to the increasing age of the plant, which went fully on-line with both reactors in 1989.

“NRDC was faced with the seemingly impossible task of demonstrating that the purpose of ” the regulation at the heart of the dispute, “(i.e. to grant Limerick an exemption from the (SAMA) requirement) would be frustrated by granting Limerick an exemption from the SAMA requirement,” the judges wrote.

SAMA stands for “Severe Accident Mitigation Alternatives” and, ironically, it was incorporated into NRC rules as the result of a legal challenge to Limerick’s original license 28 years ago made by a more local environmental group called Limerick Ecology Action.

The 1985 challenge came at a time when NRC regulations did not require those applying for a license to consider SAMAs.

In 1989, a U.S. Court of Appeals agreed with the environmentalists and ruled that the National Environmental Policy Act required the SAMA evaluation.

In 1996, the NRC changed its regulations and required all new license application to include SAMAs, but exempted those which had already conducted such a study, a small group of nuclear facilities that includes Limerick, which had completed its SAMA study under the previous court order.

When Exelon applied for a 20-year renewal of the licenses for its two nuclear reactors in 2011, NRDC petitioned authorities to intervene in the process and as a result, brought to the fore “the interplay between two seemingly contradictory NRC regulations,” as described by the judges panel in the decision Wednesday.

The NRDC’s lawyers “seem to have done the most they could in a confusion situation,” the panel wrote.

But they nevertheless concluded that even though events like the nuclear accident at Fukushima two years ago have revealed new dangers for consideration in disaster prediction, the NRC’s rules do not allow a formal new analysis of new threats and ways to mitigate them to be considered as part of the license renewal process.

Noting that NRC seems to have determined “one SAMA analysis is enough,” the judges wrote that the rules mean “once an applicant has performed a SAMA analysis, even if it was performed almost 25 years ago, the applicant does not need to perform another, regardless of whether new SAMA candidates have been discovered in the interim.”

“We’re still working our way through the decision,” said Geoff Fettus, a senior attorney with the NRDC who responded to The Mercury’s request for comment.

Quoting the ruling itself, Fettus said NRDC agrees that the situation poses a “Catch-22,” which a footnote in the decision document defines as “a paradoxical situation in which an individual cannot or is incapable of avoiding a problem because of contradictory constraints or rules.”

“The National Environmental Policy Act tells us we have to go through Door Number One, but NRC regulations say no, we have to go through Door Number Two, except we can’t go through Door Number Two,” said Fettus.

Not too surprisingly, Exelon was satisfied with the decision.

“The board’s decision was another step forward in a lengthy process designed to examine and independently validate how the station will continue safe and reliable operations throughout the extended licensing period,” Dana Melia, communications manager for the plant, wrote in an e-mail responding to The Mercury’s request for comment.

“We are pleased that the Board ruled in a timely manner and look forward to the Commission’s views on the decision,” she wrote.

“Limerick’s license renewal application is one of the strongest in the country and remains on-track, testament to the station’s history of safe and environmentally-conscious operations,” wrote Melia.

That track will not come to an end until 2014 at the earliest.

Although Exelon continues to wend its way through the re-licensing process, any final decision on all license renewals is on hold while NRC grapples with the results of an entirely different court decision — one which requires the agency to study the environmental impact of the long-term storage of spent fuel rods at Limerick, and every other nuclear plant in the country.

The spent fuel remains radioactive for thousands of years and last June, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled the NRC’s blanket regulation assuring the adequacy of the environmental protections at all sites is impractical, and an analysis of the impacts at each site must be conducted.

Whether that delay provides enough time for this latest legal tangle to be undone remains to be seen.

“At the heart of this is we are facing a situation that surpasses understanding,” Fettus said. “If it’s not resolved, so we can litigate these issue, NRC must assess if its own process poses a legal challenge to the National Environmental Policy Act.”

Any resolution will require further deliberation.

NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan indicated that with its decision, “the ASLB panel is referring the matter back to the five-member, presidentially appointed Commission that oversees the NRC for its views.”